The Politics of “Nothing Happening”: Securitisation, Temporality, and Non-Change in the Energy Crisis

The energy crisis of 2021–2023 led to an unprecedented rise in energy poverty across Europe. In the Czech Republic, the number of people affected by energy poverty nearly doubled during this period, yet no new dedicated policy instruments or institutional frameworks targeting energy poverty were introduced. This paper asks why even a severe external shock failed to trigger substantive change in the governance of socially and materially accessible energy services for end users. While crises are often understood as critical junctures that enable policy innovation and the reconfiguration of power relations, this paper argues that the Czech energy crisis instead produced continuity. Drawing on critical security studies and recent extensions of securitisation theory, the paper conceptualises non-change not as a passive outcome or policy failure, but as an actively produced political effect. The central argument is that dominant security framings during the crisis worked to stabilise existing modes of energy governance and to marginalise alternative ways of addressing household-level vulnerabilities. The paper advances the hypothesis that energy security during the crisis was framed primarily around the protection of the state, the functioning of energy markets, and the stability of supply systems, while energy poverty was either rendered invisible or treated as a secondary, indirect issue addressed through pre-existing social or efficiency measures. By constructing the crisis as an external threat requiring centralised, technocratic, and market-compatible responses, dominant actors closed down political debate on measures that would have implied structural change (such as social tariffs or decommodified energy provision for vulnerable households, stronger links between energy policy and housing, or decentralised and community-based energy poverty solutions). Empirically, the paper employs a framing analysis of policy documents and governmental statements produced during and after the crisis. Methodologically, it moves beyond speech-act-centred models of securitisation to examine securitisation as an incremental and context-dependent process embedded in broader socio-technical, institutional, and power structures. Particular attention is paid to how reference objects are constructed, which vulnerabilities are recognised as security-relevant, and how certain policy responses are legitimised while others are excluded or depoliticised. The findings show that security discourse during the crisis functioned less to enable exceptional intervention and more to restore normality by constraining the range of legitimate political action. Central to this dynamic was an emphasis on temporality: by framing the situation as an “energy war”(a temporary and exceptional condition) dominant actors implied that systemic change was neither necessary nor desirable. At the same time, a secondary discursive move problematised securitisation itself, presenting far-reaching security responses as a risk to the liberal economic order and a potential source of economic destabilisation. This “securitisation of securitisation” further narrowed the space for policy alternatives that might have challenged existing market-based arrangements. By focusing on the politics of “nothing happening,” the paper contributes to debates on securitisation, crisis governance, and energy transitions, while highlighting the risks of security framings that privilege system stability over social accessibility.